Up in the air

I was standing in the airport on what any frequent traveler would consider a very short line to security. We're just past the ID check and two women behind me in the line are debating which scanner line to take and one of them says, "It doesn't matter, whatever we choose will be wrong anyway." Mind you, we're talking about the difference between waiting for 7 minutes to get through security versus waiting 7 minutes and 30 seconds. And it strikes me that people automatically take a negative point of view when they talk about air travel these days, so let me take a moment to talk about all that is good in the air.

First of all, I'm sitting on a plane and I've managed to plug my computer in without needing any kind of adapter. How did I do this? I always remember the maxim for finding power in airports, "Think like a cleaning person." Airplanes need to be vacuumed. They don't plug vacuums into little power adapters. They plug them into 3-prong outlets the way God intended things to be plugged. That means there has to be one of those bad boys somewhere on the plane and I found one near my seat. Combine that with the preparedness to bring that most underrated of travel accessories, the compact power strip, and I'm charging my phone as well.

Even my time at the airport was in no way unpleasant. I asked the ID check woman in security if they rotated jobs at the checkpoint and she rolled her eyes, smiled and said, "Oh yeah, thank goodness. I couldn't just sit here all day." The guy at Chick-Fil-A messed up my order, but apologized profusely and immediately fixed it and gave me my food for half price without my even saying anything. The gate agent had to bring an old woman onto the plane in a wheelchair and could not have been more gentle and pleasant with her. She was actually smiling as he wheeled her down the ramp (maybe that's because she can walk- I saw her- and probably didn't even need the wheelchair, but why not if you're old). The flight attendant is absolutely charming and helpful, completely realistic in describing the food options and prompt in bringing me beer that I was unable to obtain at the airport bar. Another sees my phone, says she has the same phone and asks me if I know how to transfer music from her computer to the phone. She also brings me beer.

Some random guy on the boarding line started talking to me for no reason but turned out to be good-humored and interesting and is reading David Sedaris, which automatically marks him as okay in my book. He tells me that in Orlando the longest part of the boarding process is the so-called pre-boarding, a meaningless term if ever I've heard one, because almost everyone getting on the plane is in a wheelchair or has small kids.

It's not like there aren't annoyances. The bar had not a single seat and the waiting area was so crowded that I had to sit in a seat reserved for handicapped people, cowering and fearing that someone would give me a ticket like they do if you park in a handicapped space. But overall, it's like anything else. If you're inclined to find things unpleasant, there's plenty to complain about, but if you really pay attention to everything going on around you there's no need.

Along the corridor, and thank goodness that the Philadelphia Airport has kept their concourses narrow and intimate, not wide and spacious so you might miss things, there's a bunch of these little booth kinds of shops, like they put in the middle of a shopping mall. There's Rosetta Stone, the language learning system. I've never heard anyone say anything bad about the system, but they advertise relentlessly and never, ever say anything about how much it costs, which leads me to assume that it's hellishly expensive. They must sell some of these things, because the stand has been there for years, but I've never seen a single person even stop and look.

There's the Magic Color-Changing Markers stand, with a guy with lots and lots of personality drawing things and making them change colors. He's all but pleading with the passersby to gather and watch him work, but only other airport employees stop to chat. Who are they trying to sell these things to? It's 5PM on a weekday and almost everyone is wearing suits. Are they targeting overly busy parents who feel guilty and feel the need to bring their kids something when they come home from a business trip? I was pretty direct about this when I was a kid. My father traveled a lot when I was young and would bring me coins and sometimes bills from various countries he'd visited, so after a while the first thing I'd say to him when he came in was "Did you bring me any money?" He found this funny for reasons I did not understand at the time.

There's a stand selling Murano glass jewelry. I've been to Murano, which is near Venice, Italy, and I'm sure the traditional old-world craftspeople who work there would be glad to see their creations sold in such a venue. There's also a lot of snacky food- pretzels, popcorn and candy. I notice that the newsstand sells gum. For years you couldn't buy gum at Philadelphia airport because they feared having to scrape used gum off the floor and furniture. The fact that people sometimes need to chew gum while they fly to avoid being in intense pain never figured into the discussion. Because of course airports exist for the benefit of the people who run the airport. It wasn't until a particularly enlightened fellow took charge of the airport that there was any recognition that this was unbelievably stupid and the policy was changed.

In the men's room, there is no sink that has both a working faucet and soap dispenser, so I end up standing there with some guy laughing as we our arms over each other's to get at the soap and water.

The crew on this flight is great. Whoever makes the announcements from the cockpit really enjoys updating us on where we are. Landmarks he's pointed out that I've never heard mentioned before include Toledo, Ohio, Ft. Wayne, Indiana (a place I have actually been, twice), Des Moines, Iowa, and Nebraska. Not a particular thing about Nebraska, just Nebraska. Been there too.

One of the best things I ever did when I was younger is drive cross-county as many times as I could. I've been in all 50 states, including all of those the East Coast snobs call "flyover" states (as in, they're only there to fly over). I like this part of the country. If you're from the East Coast, the people are almost shockingly nice and life seems simpler, if not easier. I remember waking up in a Walmart parking lot in Hays, Kansas (Walmart cultivates a following of RV owner who spend nights in their parking lots and buy their groceries there). I woke up and turned on the radio in the car. I usually listen to public radio when I'm in places like Kansas because it's the only sure way to avoid country music. Instead of a traffic report, they had a farming report that I unfortunately can't remember, and as part of local news they had the crime report, which consisted of 3 cases of drunk driving and one case of the window on someone's car being broken, though nothing was stolen.

And let's not forget how miraculous the whole idea of air travel is. For most of human history, escaping gravity was an unattainable dream. I sometimes go off about how I was born at the perfect time, because so many things that everyone takes for granted were invented during my lifetime. The latest one I remembered was plastic. Plastic had existed in labs in the for a few years when I was born, but almost nobody had ever really seen anything made out of what we now call plastic. Airplanes were not one of those things that were invented during my lifetime. They were invented, if you can call it that because hundreds of people all over the world were working on perfecting powered flight, right at the beginning of the 20th century (really fascinating story, by the way). What was invented during my lifetime was flying priced for the so-called common man. You watch old movies and you can see that flight was something exclusive, something you dressed up for. Prices were regulated by the federal government and were invariably high, too much for most people to afford. But in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, who did almost as much damage to the country as did Shrub (to quote Molly Ivins, may she rest in peace), deregulated air travel and it still costs less to fly to popular destinations now than it did 40 years ago. Of course, airplanes are the new buses, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

We've now reached the point of this five-plus hour flight where I have to consider that I will eventually arrive and get off this plane, and as a result have switched from beer to water, since I'm landing soon in California and I have to drive. So what's been good about this experience? Almost everything. I've been moved from Philadelphia to Sacramento in a matter of a few hours with no problems.

Baseball post

I don't write much about baseball because I know a number of people don't care about it and I like my stuff to be interesting to anyone. I just need to acknowledge the Phillies and the evolution of Philadelphia sports since I moved here in 1987.

When I was growing up in New York, Philly's sports teams were a nonentity. Then when I first moved here, it was loserville. The Eagles were awful, the Phillies were awful, they both played in a lousy stadium and that was just how it was. But over the years, first the Eagles and later the Phillies began to turn things around. Even without winning a Super Bowl, the Eagles have more than a decade of consistent excellence to draw on. The Phillies, historically one of worst teams in baseball, took longer to gather steam.

To this day, it's a little strange to hear national commentators refer to the Phillies as a powerhouse franchise like the Yankees. It's still weird to see that Philly is a place the people want to play. But it is. They have gathered and maintained a group of very talented, resourceful players with what seems to be an almost perfect team mentality, and in the process, they've completely changed baseball fans' approach to the game. Even this summer, when they were 7 (!) games out of first with a record of 48-46, some people were grumbling but I didn't here anyone giving up, saying the season was lost. The team has shown too often that it can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the past and we've come to, if not expect, at least not be surprised when they do the near-impossible. And in doing so they've made Philadelphia a happier place every spring, summer and early fall.

As a sort-of math person, I like to think it's because they've learned that what you need to do is to always give 100%, rather than talking about giving 110%, which everyone knows is impossible.

All Downhill From Here

Yesterday I rode in my 4th MS City to Shore fundraising ride. It's 78 miles from Cherry Hill to Ocean City, NJ. This one was different because I was not really trained for it, but I made it anyway and here are my memories of it.

Rules for riding bikes in groups same as for regular traffic, just more chaotic, and the idea is the same. As with driving, the idea is to get from point A to point B without bumping into anything. The big difference is that in a car, most of the time you bump into another car it will cost you money. If you bump into another bicycle it will cost you skin.

The stops and starts are particularly crazy. Unlike a lane or two of cars, you've got an unruly clump of 50-100 or more bicycles, and as we all know the hardest, wobbliest part of riding a bike is starting up. This is particularly true if you're using something known as clipless pedals. Clipless pedal is a careless bit of nomenclature, because they refer to their lack of old-fashioned pedal clips, which are those little cages you can put your feet into.

With so called clipless pedals, you wear a special shoe with a cleat, which clips onto something where you'd expect the pedal to be (the whole assembly isn't called pedals, it's called a crank, because you get cranky when the chain falls off it). So the shoe is attached to the crank. This is terrific when you're moving, because being attached connects you to the gears securely and you don't waste any energy. If you're stopped, however, it's no better than trying to stay on a motionless bike without your feet touching the ground. You topple. It's kind of cartoon-like actually. Everyone does it at least once. So to avoid doing that when you stop you unclip and put that foot down. This makes for a pleasant mass-clicking noise as a group stops and starts as you, yes, clip back on to the clipless pedal. This is hopelessly confusing linguistically, but really the problem is that when you start back up, if you miss getting the shoe right into the cleat, your foot slips off because there's no pedal and you stop and stopping means falling. This happens to at least one person at many of these mass stops and if you're lucky it doesn't happen right in front of you.

When you lose your water bottle, suddenly all you can think about is how thirsty you are. This was miles 55-64 for me.

Biking is a zero sum game. Most rides you take begin and end in the same spot, so the net change in elevation is zero. Every uphill is balanced with a downhill or vice versa. If you ride one way, there are more options. On this particular ride, the change in elevation is from 67 feet above sea level in Cherry Hill, to the finish by the beach in Ocean City, which I didn't look up but since you can see the ocean we can call it sea level. So net elevation of -67 feet over 78 miles. That's an average grade of -.86 feet per mile, or a grade of -.016%. Let's just say that they don't make road signs warning of this kind of downward plummet. The ride is flat for the first 73 miles, and then you turn the corner and the bridges loom before you.

There are two tall bridges that connect the mainland to Ocean City. They are tall so they don't have to be drawbridges, which are fun to look at but annoying to get stuck near. These bridges are situated at right angles to each other. I'm not sure why it's done that way, but the effect for cyclists is that the good news is you never have the wind in your face for both of them, but the bad news is you almost always have the wind in your face for one of them. A couple of years ago the first bridge was so windy that you had to pedal pretty hard if you wanted to get downhill. This year, the wind was on the second bridge, but not terribly bad. Because I wasn't in shape, I was concerned about the bridges, but I've always been a reasonably strong climber and I had enough muscle memory to get over.

After you're over the bridges it's a couple of miles through Ocean City to the finish, where they (always) feed you hot dogs and pirogies and ice cream in little cups and give you t-shirts and medals. Then if you're not staying over for the ride back, it's off to the bus. The bus takes you back to the start and a truck takes your bicycle.

Everybody figures that your butt is what's most sore after 5 hours or so of riding, but that's usually not the case. My hands are always a bit sore and the shoes aren't very comfortable so your feet can be sore too. And how about your legs? To save time at the start, I don't park in the main lot but in an auxiliary starting lot 1/4 mile away. So I get on my bike, start pedaling, and think, "Wow, this isn't too bad." And then I get to the little train bridge and it's like someone lit my thighs on fire. Back to the car and then drive home. I raised $700 and may get more still. Nice way to spend a Saturday.

Test strest

Students always seem to think it's odd that I get stressed out when they're taking tests. The problem seems to be that I unconsciously empathize with the students and pick up their stress telepathically or something. It must be that, because I was never scared of tests. They were something you had to do and they had the advantage over writing papers that they were over when they were over, no matter how much or how little you did.

My favorite test memory is from Wharton. Accounting was a required couse for MBAs, and although it was never stated explicitly, it was well known that in order to pass the course you had to score 200 points combined on the 3 tests. As the semester progressed, those of us paying attention noticed that the class average had been around 80 on each of the first 2 tests. This led us to dismiss the 200 point thing as a rumor. So we walk into the final, I look at my test and I don't know the answers to any of the questions, and I only know how to begin some of them. I was aghast (actually, it was a long time ago and maybe I was merely surprised).

To put this in perspective, by this time I was in my 15th year of school and I never worried about failing because I never, ever choked on tests. I never blanked. And since there were always at least a few people in my classes who would blank, I would invariably do better than them, even if they actually knew the stuff better than me.

So I sit there thinking, "It's finally happened. I've blanked on a test." I worked on the bits and pieces of the problems that I knew but didn't finish anything. I was a 2 hour test, and with about 20 minutes left, the instructors stopped us to make an announcement. They said there was a typo on one problem (so obvious I'd already corrected it myself) so we could have an extra 10 minutes to finish. This prompted all 100 or so of us in the room to simultaneously start laughing nervously and muttering, and suddenly I realized, it wasn't me. Nobody knew any of it.

Wouldn't you know it? Those accounting professors were sticking to their 200 point thing, and since the average student had a total of 160 points after the first 2 tests, they created an impossible final with the goal of having a class average of 40. And they succeeded. I got a 61. It was the second highest grade in the class. That was in 1979 and it's the last test I took that I actually remember to this day.

All depends on your point of view

I gave a 2 hour-long Calculus test today. The students were very good-natured about it, but they did politely complain a bit about how long it was. I responded, "It was long for you? At least you had something to do for 2 hours. I had to sit around doing nothing."

They were not sympathetic to my plight.

Finally rode my bike today

It's been almost 2 weeks since I've ridden, and I'm doing an 80 mile MS fundraising ride next Saturday. As far as I'm aware, this is not the recommended training regimen, but I've been injured. This is one of the things that actually sucks about getting older. In many ways I fell better than I ever have, but it's so much easier to hurt yourself and when it happens it takes longer to heal. I sustained this injury at the end of August, and it felt like nothing at the time, but it ended up really hurting and only now is it beginning to feel somewhat better.

One of the things I like about biking in general is how it sharpens your awareness of your surroundings. I feel bad when I pass someone walking down the street wearing headphones and looking down at their phone. Why are you even out of your bed, if that's what you need to be doing? Why go outside and walk if you're not even going to experience walking?

It also makes me think about the hordes of people in health clubs pretending to run or walk or even climb stairs. Why would you pretend to climb stairs? Who had that brainstorm? "Okay, well people can now pretend to run, walk, ride bicycles or row. What else can they pretend to do? I know! Climb stairs!" I just don't see it. All of those other things can be pleasant when you do them for real. I don't even like climbing stairs when it gets me to where I want to be, so why in the world would I want to simulate that experience?

Holiday question

I will admit to being completely ignorant of any kind of Talmudic discussion of the topic, but isn't having a so-called "easy fast" counterproductive? Can one atone just as well with an easy fast as with a more difficult one? The only thing I can think of is that the point is to practice the ritual, and the ease or difficulty of the task doesn't figure into it.

School again

The beginning of school this year feels different than years past, and I noticed today that I wasn't nervous about my classes the way I usually have been on the first day of school. I think I'm a reasonably confident person. But for most of my working life, for some reason I've never been able to quite shake the feeling that I'm faking it, that I don't really know what I'm doing and that eventually everybody's going to find me out.

Fortunately, one of the comforts of being an adult (as in grown-up, not as in adult movies) is that you learn that nobody really knows what they're doing. Pretty much everyone is good at something, but pretty much nobody is good at everything. It's like in The Sims, when you made a person you had a set amount of good stuff to spread around, and you could choose which characteristics you want to make strong and which you don't care about as much. I think that people are kind of like that too. And I guess I've accepted that whatever my shortcomings, that I am an actual real-life teacher.

So now I'm left with a dilemma of sorts, where I can look around me and see that everyone is good at certain things and is just scraping by on the rest of it. There's a lot of teaching type stuff that I'm good at, but I'm still an organizational disaster. Like today, in one of my classes, I asked everyone what their book numbers were, even though I'd written them down last spring when I gave them out, because I knew that would be much faster than my looking for that piece of paper. The dilemma is whether I tell myself to settle, and decide that everyone has shortcomings and this one is just as okay as anyone else's, or do I push myself and try to become better at the things that I'm not good at.

I think we find ourselves making decisions like that often, whether consciously or not. It's an easier question for my students, because for the most part they don't really know what they're good at yet. But for someone in their mid 50's, is it now okay to say, in the words of the great philosopher Popeye, "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam," a finished product, or am I still trying to grow?

I think for me it has to be that latter, and the great thing about teaching is that you don't really even need to try. Because no matter how well you plan a lesson, kids have semi-developed brains, and so are kind of kooky and unpredictable and you never know what's going to come out of their mouths. And if trying to explain something that seems perfectly obvious to you to someone who finds the same thing mysterious or illogical or just plain wrong doesn't make you grow, I don't what will.

Chemistry humor

My daughter is taking chemistry this year, and something she was talking about reminded me of something happened on my wedding day. We were standing under the chuppah, and the rabbi, a genial older fellow who barely knew Ronnie and didn't know me at all, was giving what I presume is his stock wedding speech. It was filled with pearls of wisdom like, "Remember that 'united' and 'untied' are made up by the same letters; it just depends on where you put the 'I.' Then, in talking about the special bond that is marriage, he compared it to chemistry. How hydrogen and oxygen by themselves are gasses that go their separate way, but together they make water, without which life cannot exist. At which point my great friend Bennett whispers in my ear, "Yeah, but it takes two hydrogens to satisfy one oxygen."

Happy New Year

Those of you who feel particularly reverent about Rosh Hashanah will not find this amusing.

I'm a pretty much non-observant Jew. I've been inconsistent in my level of involvement with Judaism over the past 50 years or so. At the moment, I really don't do much beyond going to shul on high holy days and lighting candles on Chanukah. Honestly, I like the rituals and usually enjoy going to shul, but it hasn't fit well with the rhythm of my life in recent memory. It is with this background that I offer my observations after a couple of visits to services last night and this morning.

After sitting down in the sanctuary I look around, and my immediate impression is, "Wow, there are a lot of Jewish-looking people here." Granted, this should not be a surprise, but it still strikes me.

One of the things that I like about the services at my shul is the relative lack of what we call the "zum zum" part of the service. This is the part when the rabbi and hazzan are not leading a prayer but are instead praying themselves, and an undetermined number of apparently more-educated-and/or-devout-than-me people in the congregation are muttering "zum zum zum" or actually reading words but speaking too low for anyone to hear them.

I rarely go to shul, but when I do I try to really pay attention and participate. It always bothers me that people talk, sometimes at length, for example during a haftorah reading. I think, why are you here? Are you just showing your face to whoever? Why come if you're not going to actually participate, not to mention distracting others? It's like kids who talk in class. It's a selfish act.

Since I have pretty much zero Hebrew vocabulary but know the phonics, one of my favorite pastimes is "find what they're up to." This involves letting your mind wander for a minute or so, then try to find where they reader is in the middle of a paragraph. Maybe it sounds stupid but I can occupy myself for quite a while doing this. You can also race your family members.

I have never mastered the davening sway and it's an embarrassment. I also never know how long I'm supposed to stay standing during the silent prayer. I do actually think about what I want to pray, but it never takes very long. I feel stupid sitting down when the guy in front of me does, like I'm at a ballgame, but that seems to be what I end up doing.

Over the years it has become gradually more acceptable for people to applaud a particularly good shofar blast. I used to get scolded as a kid if I tried to do that instead of muttering a congratulatory zum zum.

More important life skills

My younger daughter is closing in on getting her learner's permit and she mentioned that she new exactly how to parallel park from the book. I told her I'd know she was a skilled driver when she could parallel park on the left side of the street.

Another unrelated skill: Putting a bunch of papers into an envelope after you've already pulled off the backing for the sealing flap (no fair putting the backing back on again)..

Way more than you want to know about dropping a kid at college

I've had a reasonably interesting life, but I haven't had a whole lot of momentous occasions to deal with. My parents are both still alive. I've stayed married for 24 years. I haven't moved for 18 years or changed jobs for 9 years. So aside from whatever else was going through my head, I also had some curiosity about how I would handle my daughter's actually leaving for college.

Ah, college. For the last year and a half I've heard talk of little else. And now here it is staring me in the face. Here's a detailed description of the dropoff process. Although I'd heard that the process was well organized and worked well, I had some trepidation about hundreds of people converging on a small campus with no streets of its own. I wanted to get there on the early side, and because somehow for the first time in the last 5 years, we hit no traffic on the Jersey Turnpike or the Lincoln Tunnel or any other road that we traveled and so arrived quite early indeed.

The street was an organized mob scene. Dozens of kids standing helplessly on the sidewalk surrounded by mounds of whatever one puts in a dorm room these days. A security guard waves us into a fenced-off section of curb. We start emptying the pile and I can see that the sidewalk is marked in chalk to designate dumping spots. My daughter was relieved to see that she seemed to have about the same amount of stuff as everyone else. We then tell someone at a table which spot we had our stuff in, and a few minutes later a guy with a big rolling bin comes along and we load everything in the bin and head to the room.

I knew from the floor plan that the rooms were pretty small, but even with every inch of the floor covered with our stuff, you could see it was going to fit. The room as slightly shabby (I have an eye for this having worked at Hamilton College for the summer putting a fresh coat of paint on every freshman dorm room) but certainly within reason. The kids actually get a long, detailed form describing what's wrong with the room, and presumably will be held responsible if they make it worse. For example, the air conditioner louvers are "slightly bent but functional." That kind of thing.

I'm good at unpacking, but terrible at putting things away, so I went for a walk with our younger daughter, who was along for the ride. The school is in a neighborhood where I once resided and it's practically unrecognizable. In a good way. All the dive bars are gone, replaced by upscale food markets and restaurants. Lots of places with big plastic bins, trash baskets, some-assembly-required-furniture, lamps and fans piled out on the sidewalk. The college was running a shuttle bus to Bed Bath and Beyond (I'm not kidding).

The rest of the time there was unremarkable, and we were finally kicked out around 3:30. The room looked pretty livable. I felt teary once, about a half hour before we left, but not when we said goodbye. I think it hasn't quite hit me that she's gone. The holidays are next week so she'll be back briefly then. maybe after that it'll seem more real.

P. S. I already sent a package of all the little stuff we forgot.